A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [111]
“I imagine I’ll have to take all this on faith, though,” Branwell said. “I’ve never been able to see anything but the inside of a tavern, a different tavern, yes, but still a tavern much like all the others.”
Ghost pointed heavenward, explaining that none of the other taverns had tin ceilings like this one. “Not a crack in it and there never will be a crack in it. Even if the tavern fell down there would not be a crack in that ceiling.”
Branwell looked at the ceiling, the ceiling Ghost was so fond of. The decorative swirls were confined to borders that surrounded flat square panels like an embossed baroque frame. He wondered briefly about the machine that would be required to make such a thing as a ceiling. Must the tin be heated or was it soft enough to be pushed into the shape required? Nonetheless, to his eye, there was a monotony about the resulting effect, exaggerated by the rather dirty pale yellow paint that covered it, or perhaps it was white paint, discoloured by the pipe smoke that, he was beginning to discover, filled the barroom day and night.
Ghost asked about Branwell’s financial situation, which, admittedly, was shaky at best but which he hoped would improve once he got out to Fryfogel’s.
Lingelbach, who was pretending to be absorbed by the task of wiping down the bar with a damp cloth, moved closer to the side of the room where Branwell sat with Ghost. “Road’s disappeared,” he offered.
Again? thought Branwell. What was it about him that made particles of almost everything want to accumulate wherever he went? What else could possibly happen to him? He half-expected a plague of sawdust, or of iron filings to appear in his future. He wouldn’t have been surprised if brimstone began to descend from the sky. Lingelbach was speaking again. “You’ll have to pay me,” he was saying to Branwell. “There’s the room, the board. You’ll have to pay me one way or another.”
On the fourth day of the storm Branwell descended the stairs at the tavern to be confronted by a strange scaffolding made up of two tall stepladders placed about six feet apart with a couple of wide pine boards resting between them. Ghost, who had clearly been supervising the placement of this scaffold, took Branwell by the arm. “I see pictures on this ceiling,” he said, “and,” he nodded his head in the direction of the bar, “so does Lingelbach. We both see you painting these pictures, starting this morning.”
Branwell had no desire to paint a ceiling. He was tired, sad, and slightly disoriented by being in the company of others after his solitary life in the hotel. He thought about snow falling on the roof of his old home and wondered how the shingles would hold up if this storm were to travel eastward. Looking at the scaffolding, he said, “I’m not Michelangelo, you know, I’m not Tiepolo.”
“Who?” asked Ghost.
“Who?” echoed Lingelbach, once again pretending to be absorbed in sponging down the bar. When Branwell answered with nothing but a sigh, the owner of the establishment added philosophically, “No matter, whoever they were, they would have had to pay for room and board.”
Maintenance, thought Branwell, is so central to human life, it’s a wonder the very enormity of it didn’t cause hopeless exhaustion in those who thought about it. Maintenance and money. There was a price to pay for sleeping at night and a price to pay for waking up in the morning. There was a price to pay for shaving your face and cutting your hair, for the clothes on your back and the food that you ate. And there was an even bigger price to pay, as far as he could tell, for having experienced happiness. I’ve lost everything, he concluded.
“You haven’t lost me,” said Ghost, reading his mind.
When he wasn’t eating or drinking, Branwell spent his remaining few days at the tavern lying on his back. As his friend had predicted several years before, paint did indeed drip into his eyes as well as into his moustache and onto his face. But there was one comfort, and that comfort had to do with weather. Branwell